Dr Naosuke Mukoyama1
1University Of Tokyo, Bunkyo-ku, Japan
Biography:
Naosuke Mukoyama is an Associate Professor of Global Governance at the Institute for Future Initiatives, University of Tokyo. His research examines the emergence and development of the sovereign state, covering state formation, resource politics, and historical international relations. He is the author of Fuelling Sovereignty: Colonial Oil and the Creation of Unlikely States (Cambridge University Press, 2024). His work has appeared in European Journal of International Relations, Comparative Politics, and Democratization, among others.
Abstract:
Standard explanations of state formation based on the European experience understand the making of territory as a top-down process associated with the penetration of society and the centralization of authority. However, in early modern Japan, “modern” territory was created through a bottom-up process. During the Edo period (1603-1868), the central authority, the Tokugawa shogunate, directly controlled only a small portion of lands, and the rest was under the rule of domanial lords. Although it attempted to impose its spatial ideology of a unified Japan, disregarding the territoriality of individual domains, domanial lords resisted such attempts and successfully established what closely resembles modern territory within their domains. Domains too, however, struggled to take full control of their territory and centralize the authority vis-à-vis the peasantry. As a result, it was peasants who demarcated domanial borders rather than the domanial government itself. This article thus revises the existing understanding of state formation, and more specifically, the making of territory. The history of state formation is frequently written as a path leading to the central state’s victory over other actors. However, the case of early modern Japan shows that, even in the general dominance of the higher authority, there was still significant room for lower-level actors to actively influence the mode of rule to fit their own interests.